A new Kaiser poll
shows that among registered voters in Florida, 80% think Medicare is very important or extremely important for their vote and
by a margin of 53% to 38% they prefer Obama rather than Romney to handle the matter. Recent polls have shown Obama
with a small but consistent lead in Florida, no doubt due in part to Florida's many seniors (in 2008, 20% of
Florida's voters were at least 65). In retrospect, Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate may have
been a mistake, since his plan to change Medicare from a defined benefit program to a defined contribution program
is wildly unpopular in Florida, the most important swing state of all. Furthermore, Ryan's plan is
also unpopular
in Ohio and Virginia, the second and fourth biggest swing states.

Also related to health care, nationally, Obamacare care is becoming more popular. The study showed that 45% of U.S. adults approve of it while
40% disapprove. The poll didn't ask why people disapprove, but earlier polls have consistently shown that something
like 10-15% disapprove of it because they want to get rid of the fee-for-service model altogether and go over
to a single-payer system like Canada has.

Considering that the election is almost 6 weeks away, we are getting a surprising number of premortems
already. Some people have said that the problem is the
Republican Party,
which demands its candidates to take
stands in the primaries that are deadly in the general election.
Politico has another view.
In a piece today,
it argues that the reason Romney is falling behind is not the boring convention, leaked videos, Stuart Stevens,
the improving economy, media bias, distorted polls, the message, or Mormonism. The problem is Mitt.
He may be a great analytical businessman but on the campaign trail, he is no Bill Clinton. His political instincts
are all wrong. His offer to bet Rick Perry $10,000 during one of the primary debates was completely off. If he had
said: "Betcha a million bucks" everyone would have known it was just a figure of speech and not an actual offer.
If he had said: "I'll bet you $100" it would have been a plausible offer that wouldn't have shocked anyone. But
$10,000 was just the wrong thing to say.
It showed that he lives in a world where $10,000 is nothing, a world completely alien to most voters.
The average family has
$3800 in the bank
and a credit card debt of $2200.
These people don't make casual $10,000 bets.

Another problem Romney has is that the son of a millionaire governor who made a vast fortune liquidating
companies and whose program is mostly tax cuts for the rich is not a good fit for an era where many people are
suffering. Rich people have been elected President before. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Jack
Kennedy were no paupers, but their programs were aimed at helping ordinary people, not helping people like themselves.
John McCain had more houses than he could count, but his main goal was not cutting taxes for the rich.
Romney seems completely tone deaf to the fact that a rich candidate can't run on a platform of lower taxes for the
rich and expect it to go over well. If his main argument had been something like: "I am a businessman and I want to see 1 million new
businesses created in my first four years" it would have made a totally different impression.
People who have a vague idea of some day starting a business might have been attracted to that.
But now he is stuck
with what he is and there is not much time left to change it.

It is very hard for many Republicans to accept the fact that they have the wrong candidate for this moment in
time (even though many of them actually thought that during the primaries), hence the search for scapegoats.
The most popular one this week is the supposed
bias of the polls.
Critics say the polls contain too many Democrats so Obama looks good. Most pollsters, however, don't correct
their samples for partisan identification. If 35% of the sample is Democratic and 28% Republican (as in a recent
Pew poll), that is because 35% of the actual respondents said they were Democrats.

Romney and Ryan spent three crucial days touring Ohio, but some people,
like Time's Michael Crowley, say they are in the
wrong state.
Maybe they should be touring Florida, not Ohio.
Not only does it have more electoral votes (29 vs. 18), but it may be more winnable.
Our current average of five polls this week puts Obama ahead of Romney in Ohio by a margin of 51% to 44%.
In Florida, the average of seven polls show that Obama is only up 4 points there, 50% to 46%.
Each state poses a different problem, however. In Ohio, Romney has to deal with his
"Let Detroit go bankrupt" op-ed piece, something not wildly popular with the tens of thousands of workers
at auto-parts plants in the state. In Florida, Romney's problem is Medicare. Both are formidable, but
Romney is not as far behind in Florida and there are more electoral votes at stake there, so maybe Crowley is
right and Romney ought to go south.

While there has been a lot of talk about the voter ID laws, there hasn't been a lot of discussion about provisional ballots.
After the Florida 2000 fiasco, Congress passed the
Help America Vote Act, which among other things,
provides that voters who aren't on the voting rolls or don't have the required ID can cast a provisional ballot, which will ultimately
be counted if the problem can be solved after the election. If large numbers of people show up without voter ID, they will all have to cast provisional ballots.
Consequently, the election results in close states could be
delayed by a week
or more. By then, the lawyers will have swarmed and it could get very, very messy.

While debates are a standard part of presidential campaigns now, this was not always the case. In the 19th century, candidates didn't really
campaign much, let alone debate. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (1) were hardly debates at all, but rather a series of long (30-90 min)
speeches and (2) were for a Senate race, not the presidency. The first modern presidential debate was Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960.
American Prospect
has a good story about the debates as well as some
great footage
of the Kennedy-Nixon debate. While many people
watched the debate, subsequent candidates didn't think debating was worth the trouble, so the second one was in 1976.
The current formats were established only in 1996.

A question that comes up all the time is: "Do debates matter?"
The short answer is "not much" unless someone blunders badly. When Jerry Ford said that Poland was not under Soviet domination, it probably
shifted some votes because it reinforced the image that Ford was not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree (Lyndon Johnson once famously
said:
"Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time").
Most of the time Democrats think the Democrat won and Republicans think the Republican
Republican won so they are generally not game changers.
Here are some of the more iconic moments
from past debates.

Early in-person voting
started
yesterday in Iowa, one of fewer than a dozen swing states that will determine the outcome of the election.
Early-bird voters are generally highly educated, highly informed, and frequently quite partisan. They know
who they support and nothing is going to change that opinion.
The Obama campaign is encouraging voters to vote early because their current feeling is that this could be the
high point of the campaign with the race tightening later on so every vote locked down now is a vote that can't change.

Our map above supports this view. Obama is now leading in every swing state except Missouri, which, like
New Mexico, has lost nearly all of its swing. At 347 electoral votes, Obama has probably maxed out (with the
possible exception of one congressional district in Nebraska he might yet win).
It is very unlikely he will get more than 347 or 348 but could get appreciably less. Nevertheless, there is
more joy in Chicago than in Boston right now.

The popular image of the undecided voter is someone who has kept close track of the election and likes some things about Obama and likes
other things abut Romney and just can't decide for whom to vote. For the most part, that is not true. The undecided voters aren't paying attention,
don't have any opinion on the subject, and don't care much. There is also a good chance many of them won't bother voting.

Ezra Klein compares
their attitudes on politics to his attitude on baseball: he knows it exists and at the end of the season there is a World Series, but he doesn't
know who the contenders are, doesn't know who won last year, and frankly doesn't care. A better example for Americans would be to imagine
you were called by a pollster asking who you thought was going to win the World Cup soccer tournament in 2014. For the undecideds here, the
true answer might be: "Beats me and furthermore I couldn't care less."
Of course, some of the political undecideds may watch the debates or start paying attention at the end of October, but for many of them, they think politics
is too far from their lives to matter much.

Nearly all the billionaires making big donations to superPACs this year have been Republicans, but finally
one Democrat is stepping up. George Soros has
given
$1 million to Obama's superPAC Priorities USA. Soros has given money to other Democratic-aligned superPACs this year,
just not to Obama's. He is reportedly not entirely happy with Obama. In previous years, a gift of $1 million would
have been enormous, but with people like Sheldon Adelson shelling out $100 million, it is small potatoes.